Mentor RTOS claims size, speed improvements

SAN FRANCISCO  Mentor Graphics Corp. Monday (Sept. 25) rolled out the latest release of its flagship Nucleus Plus real-time operating system (RTOS), claiming a smaller, faster and easier to use RTOS to build embedded applications for a variety of target markets.

"The changes are highly targeted to focus on speed, size and ease of use," said Neil Henderson, general manager for Mentor's embedded systems division, in a statement.

According to Mentor (Wilsonville, Ore.), Nucleus Plus comprises generic and hardware-dependent code. Generally, generic code has already been proved in previous applications and requires no change from processor to processor, the company said.

More than 80 percent of the assembly code in the Nucleus Plus RTOS has been replaced with ANSI C, alleviating the need for developers to know how the RTOS software interacts with the hardware, according to Mentor. The code has also been reorganized for decreased complexity, the company said. As a result, Nucleus Plus now provides a kernel that is smaller and faster, according to the company.

Mentor said Nucleus customers with regulatory requirements to meet, such as those in the medical, industrial, avionics and other transportation industries, can especially benefit from the reduced complexity and increased performance and quality. Not only are they able to more quickly and accurately migrate from their development hardware to their custom hardware, but they can also reuse more of their testing and certification artifacts produced from prior uses of Nucleus Plus, the company said.

"When a real-time operating system has been used and trusted for over a decade, the decision to perform a major revision is not taken lightly," said Glen Johnson, director of product marketing for Mentor's embedded systems division. "That is why the reorganization was localized to the target-specific portion of the Nucleus Plus RTOS. The generic or non-hardware dependent features are proven solid in millions of devices worldwide."

The Nucleus embedded software is sold with source code and without royalty fees, Mentor said. Licenses for the Nucleus software begin at $14,495.